Semantics lecture notes

1. Context and Inference
• Deixis
• Spatial Deixis:
It’s too hot here in the sun, let’s take our drinks into the shade over
there.
I’m glad we moved here, I was melting over there.
• The adverbs here and there pick out places according to their
proximity to the location of the speaker.
• Demonstratives work in a similar way: English has a two-term
opposition between this/these and that/those. Once again the
current speaker occupies the reference point: items closer to her will
be described as this/these, items further away as that/those.

2. The Location of the speaker:
a) Don’t come into my bedroom. b) Don’t go into my bedroom.
• Person deixis:This information is grammaticalized by pronouns: typically a
first person singular pronoun is used for the speaker, second person
pronouns for addressee(s), and minimally, a third person category for a
category “neither-speakernor-addressee(s).”
• Social deixis: The pronoun systems of some languages also
grammaticalize information about the social identities or relationships of the
participants in the conversation.
The distinction in many European languages between “familiar” and “polite”
pronouns, for example tu/vous in French, t ´u/usted in Spanish, du/Sie in
German. Speakers of these languages are committed to revealing their
calculations of relative intimacy and formality to their addressees.

3. If we identify this category of social deixis, then Asian languages like Japanese,
Korean, and Balinese have much richer systems for grammaticalizing social relations.
In Japanese, for example, distinctions are marked by the speaker not only in relation to
an addressee but also to third persons referred to:
• a. Tanaka-san ga kudasaimashita.
• “Mr Tanaka gave it to me.”
• [where hearer is on a somewhat formal basis with speaker]
• b. Tanaka-san ga kudasatta.
• “Mr Tanaka gave it to me.”
• [where hearer is a friend of speaker]

4. Reference and Context
• I’m looking for the new wolf (i.e. Wolfe).
where the speaker obviously felt that the new Wolfe was sufficient for the
bookseller to identify the new book by Tom Wolfe. The point here is that the
ordinary use of referring expressions involves calculations of retrievability, which
take account of contextual information.
• Knowledge as Context: These calculations of retrievability are really
guesses about knowledge: a speaker choosing how to make reference to
an entity must make estimations of what her hearers know

5. • three different sources for the knowledge a speaker has to
estimate:
1. that computable from the physical context; (Giving background
knowledge to computers) E.g.: Artificial Intelligence
2. that available from what has already been said; (Discourse as
context)
E.g. a. Who moved these chairs? b. Ronan did.
• 3. that available from background or common knowledge.
(Background knowledge as context)
E.g. A: I’m hungry. B: I’ll lend you some money.

6. Information Structure
We have been looking at how different types of knowledge provide a contextual
background for understanding utterances, and at how speakers routinely make
guesses about the knowledge accessible to their listeners. Speakers “package”
their utterances to take account of these estimates of knowledge. This packaging
is often called information structure or, alternatively, thematic structure.
• The information status of nominals:One basic way for a speaker to convey her
assumption that something is given is to use a definite nominal. One way to do
this in English is to use the definite article the; compare for example:
• a. I’m going to the party.
• b. I’m going to a party.

7. In this approach the indefinite article a used with the nominal in a signals the rightmost
end of the Givenness Hierarchy: its use just assumes that the hearer can identify
the type of thing referred to. The referentially indefinite use of this in the b
version signals an extra message: that the speaker intends to refer to a particular
dog subsequently. The definite article the in c signals the assumption that the
hearer can identify the referent. The demonstrative that in d assumes previous
familiarity with the referent from the hearer’s part. The demonstrative article this
and the pronominal versions this and that in e signal that the referent has been
mentioned, or “activated” in the discourse.

8. • Focus and topic: Another marker of information structure in English is
intonation, where the assignment of primary stress can be used to bring
parts of the sentence into prominence. One of the main functions of this
prominence is to mark new information. In the following examples,
capitals show this primary stress, and we divide the given and new
elements of the sentence:
a. HENRY cleaned the kitchen.
b. Given: Someone cleaned the kitchen.
c. New: It was Henry.
a. Henry cleaned THE KITCHEN.
b. Given: Henry cleaned something.
c. New: It was the kitchen.

9. • a. It was yesterday that Bob came. (cleft)
• b. It was Bob who came yesterday. (pseudo-cleft)
• Information structure and comprehension:
a. The sun’s shining, it’s a perfect day. Here come the astronauts. They’re just
passing the Great Hall; perhaps the President will come out to greet them.
No, it’s the admiral who’s taking the ceremony…
b. It’s the sun that’s shining, the day that’s perfect. The astronauts come here.
The Great Hall they’re just passing; he’ll come out to greet them the President.
No, it’s the ceremony that the admiral’s taking…
As can be seen, the use of inappropriate markers of information structure, in effect disregarding the
reader’s evolving state of knowledge, makes the text incoherent and difficult to read. The point is of
course that in reality speakers continually assess their audience’s knowledge, and package their
utterances accordingly.

10. Inference
• I left early. I had a train to catch.
• INFERENCE: Speaker left because of having to catch the train.
• A: Did you give Mary the money?
• B: I’m waiting for her now.
• INFERENCE: B did not give Mary the money.

11. Conversational Implicature (Grice)
• an approach to the speaker’s and hearer’s cooperative use of inference.
• Grice’s Co-operative Principle (Grice 1989: 26)
• Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the
accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
• Relevance
• A: Can I borrow ten euros?
• B: My purse is in the hall.
• (Implicature: Yes.)
• Here it is A’s assumption that B’s reply is intended to be relevant that allows the inference:
yes. The implicature has three characteristics: firstly, that it is implied rather than said;
secondly, that its existence is a result of the context, the specific interaction – there is, of
course, no guarantee that in other contexts My purse is in the hall will mean “yes”; the third
characteristic is that such implicatures are cancellable, or defeasible in the terminology

12. • Defeasibility of implicature
• A: Can I borrow ten euros?
• B: My purse is in the hall. But don’t you dare touch it. I’m not lending you any
more money.
• Quantity
• A: Did you drink all the bottles of juice in the fridge?
• B: I drank some.
• (Implicature: B didn’t drink them all.)

13. Lexical Pragmatics
• seeks to investigate how the meanings of words reflect or are adjusted to
specific contexts.
• The verb open for example seems to describe different actions depending on what is
being opened:
Verb open
a. Joan opened the door.
b. Joan opened the wine.
c. Joan opened the curtains
d. Joan opened the box.
e. Joan opened her eyes.
f. Joan opened the book.

14. • Broadening
a. Bornholm Island is rectangular.
b. His father has a square face too.
In these examples it is unlikely that the speaker intends the strictly geometric
sense of the Word but words for shapes.
c. She can just google the restaurant.
• Narrowing:
Brian does not drink.

15. Summary: One response is to distinguish between three types of meaning: the conventional meaning of words
and sentences in the language, the speaker’s intended meaning, and the hearer’s constructed meaning. Another
possibility is to call the linguistically encoded sentence meaning, simply meaning; the speaker meaning, content;
and the hearer meaning, interpretation.
W. D. Whitney (1867: 14–15):
Sentences are not images of thoughts, reflected in a faultless mirror; or even photographs, needing only to have the color
added: they are but imperfect and fragmentary sketches, giving just outlines enough to enable the sense before which they
are set up to seize the view intended, and to fill it out to a complete picture; while yet, as regards the completeness of the
filling out, the details of the work, and the finer shades of coloring, no two minds will produce pictures perfectly accordant
with one another, nor will any precisely reproduce the original.